Experiments in Life Writing

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My son told me a joke on the walk to school this morning. He’s in fourth grade. It went like this

Popular kid in school says, “I got 9 kills in Fortnite yesterday!”

Shy kid in the corner says, “I got 9 kills yesterday too.”

“Oh you play that game too?”

Shy kid, “What game?”

Everyone runs out of the classroom.

Mom: that’s a sad sick joke right out of 2023

Boy: More like 2022.

Just thought I’d share how the reality of school shootings has seeped into elementary school jokes.

When I think back to the sick jokes kids told in my elementary school they were mostly about penises and horrible things happening to women.

What were some things kids joked about when you were in grade school?

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Update

I had been diving deep into the cadance of the lyrics and rhythms on the guitar parts. I was going to overwrite Shut Up Kiss Me by Angel Olsen as an exercise, a poetry assignment actually. Then I got hit with a stomach bug. It came on slowly. As my stomach tightened the words kept playing over and over in my mind. Shut Up Kiss me hold me tight. I went back in time to when I would have had the passion and sexuality to write that song. When I was 25 I rocked my original songs onstage so hard. One of the first songs was called "5 Time Loser, "I'm a mess of a girl, coming down off another love..." It had the same chords as Shut Up Kiss Me. I could access this boundless source of emotional fuel to rock out. I never ran out of energy. I was able to unapologetically express my emotions through songs. But I'm not that person anymore. I'm not someone who would write Shut-up Kiss me, or even cover it. In my spinning aching body I could feel how it would feel to have that song inside you and let it out into such a well produced ditty. It feels like greatest power on earth. We're here on this planet for a little while, we don't know why, we try to find meaning in everything we can, and we hang on as long as we can. I feel bad. The only thing worse than an upset stomach is looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself.

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I'm learning this song right now and it's so rad.

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I’m trying a new coffee today and I don’t know why it’s looking at me like this. It’s like Mona Lisa’s smile. You’ll never know.

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I had such a great time making an experimental film in Poetry Workshop with the Graduate Film Students. We all partnered up and had a week to make a film using an exhibit from the Watts Institute's "Drums Listen to Heart" as a jumping off point. I used text from "Applause Dictionary" to make a poem and put it to music with a voice over of the poem. Then I put it on my YouTube channel cuz why not? Poetry on film, it's something, not sure what, but it's something.

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Inspired to grow seeds after reading Jasmin’s newsletter talking about the Persian New Year. These are not the traditional lentil, they are chia seeds. Let’s see how they grow…🌱🌱🌱🌱

Happy March 🦁🐑🐣🌸

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Good morning!

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Women protesting in Iran symbolize desire for freedom – DW – 12/19/2022

French feminist and author Helene Cixous speaks to DW about the courage shown by women protesting in Iran and what the movement means for t

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mini dachshund is how my new app transcribes my great-grandmother's name. Her name was Minnie Dotson. Minnie Mouse was named after her because she was born in 1900. Minnie Mouse was created in 1928 which at 28 would be a pretty sexy age for Minnie, but by then she had already had three kids and a wayward husband. And for better or worse (definitely worse) the line was broken from the Datsuns' who made cars. But that is even further back than I've gone so far.

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‎QAnon Anonymous: Episode 217: QAnon's Movie Obsession on Apple Podcasts

‎Show QAnon Anonymous, Ep Episode 217: QAnon's Movie Obsession - Jan 31, 2023

When and how film is fodder for fascism. I live off this podcast, having known many souls red pilled into a reality outside my own, trying to understand how all this is happening. Great episode.

It's also really funny despite the sad reality of masses of brains melting.

"White Squall, The Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, The Godfather 3, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Hunt for Red October… We explore how QAnon's obsession with movies can be explained by philosopher Theodor Adorno's theory on the commodification of popular culture and right wing propaganda. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Liv Agar: https://linktr.ee/livagar QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com Written by Liv Agar. Music by NAP. Editing by Corey Klotz."

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Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The (1928) -- (Movie Clip) State Of Grace

Things go badly for Joan (Maria Falconetti), under intense questioning early in her trial, in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of A

Having my 2nd Film Studies Renaissance. Subscribed to the Criterion Channel a couple months ago to dive into the greats. I did this with Netflix in the early 2000s when the DVD came in the mail and you could create a queue online of all the films you wanted to see. They had a much broader collection than the streaming platform today. Back then I watched every David Lynch film and doc they had, early Scorsese, all the Godfathers Coppola made, LGBTQ films, and lots of great documentaries like Born Rich and Life and Debt.

At the time I wondered if I was wasting my life away watching all these films in my apartment in my mid-late 20s. Maybe I should have been less anti-social. I definitely don't regret it, because so much of our world is referential to film. This time I'm diving way back in time. Most recently I watched The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), France. Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer uses cuts in the film to keep us inside the experience of Joan. Based on the actual text from the trial in the late 1400s that ended in her/their execution this film invented cuts that filmmakers use today as standards of practice to keep us in the now of the film, which if done well should also elicit the now of the watcher (Nathaniel Dorsky). I was first and foremost struck by the statements and the bad-assery of Joan as a young person standing up to a room full of old men. One of the most mind-blowing things was recognizing the familiar camera/directing techniques we take for granted today as having always been there. This was a moment of creation, where it clicked, where we could be fully in the now of the interiority of the character. Actress, Renee Jean Falconetti moves mountains with her performance. I was also SO stoked to see Antonin Artaud's name in the opening credits. Famous for his "insanity" and more importantly for developing the Theater of Cruelty, I have been studying his work for 20 years (not as an actual scholar but as a fan). I never thought I would see him alive. That magic of cinema never ends...

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I started a project using an audio diary. I’ve never done this bc I hate listening to my recorded voice and who has the time to go back and listen to themselves for a second time and type it all up? So I fed the audio file to the computer and it miraculously and clumsily transcribed my spoken words with time stamps, robotic punctuation, and typos, words it thought I said but words I didn’t actually say. It also censored my profanity with asterisk. What the **** ? I printed the pages and cut out words and phrases that caught my eye. I am creating poetry from the words I distill. I found the act of speaking my inner thoughts to be empowering in a way I hadn’t expected. The process is changing me and strengthening my own voice.

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I began writing this song right before the pandemic lockdown. Seems appropriate again as I journey deeper into writing. I recorded during the early days of sheltering in place, in my room, on garage band, something I had never done before.